Cinemavenger

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Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn

It may not square with your personal experience, but the fact is that women don't run their mouths more than men do.  The "scientific finding" that guys only grunted around 7,000 words per day while dolls blabbed around 20,000 has been proven to be as scientific as horoscopes or phrenology.  Still, there sure are a whole lot of words in the title of the female-written, female-directed, female-starring, female-centric Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn, so, um . . .

Another commonly held, equally sexist belief is that men are better than women at most everything except for chattering on forever about nothing.  Well, that and bleeding for a week without dying.  If nothing else, Birds of Prey proves that anything dudes can do chicks can do better, including making wildly mediocre movies.

Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie "The Automaton") was hands, feet, tits, and ass down the best thing about 2016's DC villains team up, Suicide Squad.  Of course, her competition wasn't exactly fierce.  If you can't shine brighter than a sleepy Will Smith, an ass-showing Jared Leto delivering the worst Joker ever, and a wooden model trying to be a real-girl actress, you're kind of fucked for starters.

So people were understandably excited about Robbie's Harley getting her own movie.  People were also excited about Al Capone's vault, Game of Thrones, and fax machines at one point or another, which goes to show that people are shitwits, and genuinely exciting things come along less frequently than Haley's Comet.

Why does Birds of Prey shit on our heads?  Firstly, Harley Quinn is only as fun as she is outrageous, and you can count the jaw-dropping, balls-fondling, outrageous moments on display here on one hand with fingers left over.  Secondly, a movie like this is only ever as good as its villain, and as much as I love me some Ewan "Obi Wan Renton" McGregor, his Roman Sionis/Black Mask is just a rich kid bully, which makes him as scary as warm milk and as memorable as . . . what was I talking about again?

Maybe they'll get the next Harley Quinn movie right.  Oh wait, this is DC we're talking about.  Fucking forget it.

February 7, 2020